In a recent skype conversation, one of my players from London accused my GMing style of being “very sandbox,” and even went so far as to imply that there is little difference between me and the OSR. This has me a little confused as to what sandboxing is, since I don’t do any of the following:
- Random terrain generation
- Random monster encounters
- Random adventure generation
- Morale checks, or any kind of non-deliberative decisions about monster behaviour
and, as far as I know, most of my campaigns have a strong plot element (though I tend to allow the players to decide what direction to go, including which side to pick).
So I’m wondering – if I don’t do any of these things, and I like “story,” is it possible to be a sandbox-GM? Jesus, these days I don’t really even make maps.
Compromise and Conceit 
September 17, 2010 at 10:15 pm
I definitely don’t think of you as OSR
September 18, 2010 at 12:25 am
It was my understanding that at least from a crpg perspective that sandbox was open choice of gameplay even if there is a plot in any sort of well defined world. In that definition, most of us probably do sandbox play.
September 18, 2010 at 1:13 am
Two quick things, and then I’m gone.
1) What does the OSR have to do with sandboxing, and why is it an insult?
2) If you’re curious, I posted my thoughts on your comments on Dungeons and Digressions and would welcome your comments on the matter. I think we have wildly differing perspectives on the topic and would welcome your input.
September 18, 2010 at 5:51 am
Maybe Grey is right. Seems plausible.
September 18, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Greg and Grey, I was thinking that sandbox meant you controlled the terrain and setting as well as the plot (hence “sandbox,” with its implications of a motile environment). I use maps of the world, largely, and have done for years, which gives a default setting where the entire world can be explored, but it’s only by default – I’m lazy and can’t be bothered making my own maps and I like to have city maps available to me (I’m very very bad at anything artistic, and making cities is hard). So my open worlds are a consequence of, well, luck more than anything else. It’s neither intentional nor particularly desirable from my perspective.
Mr. Lawful Indifferent (great name, btw, and is it an official OSR alignment?), sandboxing is generally presented within the OSR as an OSR thing – hence my list of random-generated stuff I don’t do. The “insult” element is a reference to a few past run-ins with the world of grognards, who seem to be best characterised by their desire to tell everyone how they’re the only people who know what role-playing is – an attitude I find stupendously offensive.
I’ll go over and have a look at your post now, thanks for the heads up and thanks for commenting here.
September 18, 2010 at 10:23 pm
As the blaggard who accused you of this I may as well expand upon my slur.
For me, sand box gaming is putting the PCs into an open gaming world where they can choose what action to take and then letting their choices drive the story evolution. As such, the GM has to respond by either having multiple plots on the go that they can run into, or creating the plots once the characters determine which way their headed. An example of this is a “plot free” dungeon, as the characters can freely choose which passage they go down and the GM knows what’s down each option. This dungeon scenario is a very small sandbox though, as while the characters can choose which passage to go down they can’t decide to travel to the next town, as the GM doesn’t have any idea what the next town is, set up a waffle making business.
On a larger scale, if the GM said “You’re in a pub looking for work. There’s an old man in the corner, or a merchant down the street looking for guards, or a nearby dungeon you could explore.” then this would be a fairly large sandbox. The sandbox ultimately only needs to be large enough that the players don’t hit the sides in order for it to appear to be infinite. So if the players were happy with a choice of a cliched fantasy quest, an escort mission or a dungeon crawl then my example above covers enough. But if they immediately want to gank the local king and take over the place then the GM needs to either shut them down (which can be interpreted as rail-roading) or frantically try to catch up.
In your games, we tended to discuss what our plan was for the next week in advance and you would accept whatever the group’s plan was and work from that. As such you may not have had the full work out there available as a sandbox, but we still never hit the “sides” of the sandbox therefore from my perspective I was playing in a world where all options were open and the game world reacted to my actions.
Maybe if we wanted to extend the analogy there is a medium place between story based railroads and totally open sandboxes, a sort of “swim lanes” way of playing that does have limits on it but doesn’t does try to provide freedom inside those limits. I suspect most “sandbox” settings will still have some sort of limit like that on them as ultimately the point of the game is to have fun, and if the GM took the approach of “Whatever the players choose is OK with me” could lead to a GM who wants to play D&D having to run a game with a plot taken directly from FATAL (if the players were sick enough). Hopefully the GM would then drop their belief that they’d let the players do whatever they want [1].
Hmm, I’m going to end up having to defend/explain this I suspect. Please don’t assume I’m intending to imply anyone here (or hopefully anywhere) plays FATAL. It’s just an extreme example of a way to hit a boundary that the GM would put in the game.
[1] I know that any decent GM could shut down a FATAL-ish game immediately though in game mechanisms, but frankly the out of game approach of telling the offending player(s) they’re sick is probably a better result.
September 18, 2010 at 11:59 pm
I think that’s a good definition of sandbox, and certainly what I aim for. But I’m not sure if it’s the official version.
And you’re still a bastard!
September 19, 2010 at 12:53 pm
Yeah, I wouldn’t sweat it much Faust. That is, unless you are running people off left and right~ I think it’s a compliment if you can do it well, rather than pinning the poor bastards to 1 plot line.